re: ...

Hi! I started the transition to becoming a fully self employed home cake making business back in March this year. I made the decision after a lot of encouragement from family and friends as I was already doing a lot of projects and developing my skills. I had previously worked as a manager in healthcare for a number of years, so had a lot of transferable business skills and although I have had no real formal training I am a self taught cake decorator and used a lot of tools to help me practice my skills especially with online tutorials and advice from a number of Facebook groups and online blogs. I now work part time in my day job and focus on my cake business 4 days per week – this for the moment works for me but in the longer term I do want to do this full time. The only advice I would give is build up a good relationship with your EHO, obtain your Food Hygiene Level 2 qualification, ensure you have Public Liability insurance and keep good accounts and records as you will have to declare any earnings to HM Revenue (even if you are earning under the tax threshold). I have an accounts background so manage my own accounts but some people do want to look at employing and accountant to ensure they are completing their self assessment correctly.

My only other piece of advice is don’t under sell yourself – in my area there are other cake decorators who charge a lot less than I do but they don’t appear to provide the same quality of cake / decoration skills I do. I probably only get about 40-50% of the work I actually quote for but I truely believe that it is better to make a profit on this amount of work than break even or worse make a loss on 100% of the work. I think we all leap into this business to make some extra cash not to lose money!

I hope this helps and if you wanted to have a chat please let me know – I probably don’t have the answers to everything but maybe can at least point you in the right directed.

Glenys x